In the middle class where women graduate college at twice the rate as men, move to big cities for a lucrative career, and delay childbirth until their 30s, women are easily outpacing men in earnings.
That’s not what the data shows. Let’s call “easily outpacing” as earning at least 110% between medians. The metros where this happens are: Wenatchee, WA, Morgantown, WV, Barnstable Town, MA, and Gainesville, FL. In every single other one, it’s either pretty close or below 100%.
Which is pretty heavily at odds with the “easily outpacing” statement.
Yup this is one of those headlines that generates the opposite discussion of what the data actually shows. The conversation on this article will naturally be about how men are falling behind or about how feminism is outdated but the actual data in the article shows men outearning women in most metro areas (in some of them, by huge amounts) and women outearning men in some metro areas.
The article shows men earning more than women. But the discussion is all based on the interpretation that women are now outearning men.
If the point is egalitarianism(which I believe is ostensibly the whole point), then both are wrong and need to change. We should be aiming for equal pay, rather than considering progress to be only when women outpace men
Sure. But it is just interesting how "in a few small cases, women outperform men" is often considered a larger crisis than the multi-generational norm of men dominating various careers and fields.
Egalitarianism would imply that 50% of metros have one outearning the other, as the differences would be noise. As opposed to the 91% of metros where men out earn women today in this age group.
Perhaps society shouldn’t make women choose between a career and a family and it would be less of a problem. Many white collar workplaces are pretty hostile to working mothers in some ways overt, and other ways more subtly.
It’s entirely possible to have a culture where women can have families and careers at the same time. It’s entirely a cultural problem and is completely solvable if there is a collective will to solve it.
Outsourcing childrearing to daycare farms is prioritizing work over family. Sometimes it's necessary. But often it's not. Both parents can't work full time and effectively rear young children IMO. Under such a scenario kids are spending 9 hours a day with paid strangers and 3 hours a day with the actual parents (or less, if you count naps).
In Quebec/Canada, when state-spondored affordable daycare was introduced, it made a notable difference both for the number of women in the workforce, and also an increase in childbirth.
Far from perfect, it was defunded in recent years, and it again made the birthrate and workforce go down. As a parent, I can anecdotally say that this system, when it worked, made a huge difference for our family.
I didn’t read the underlying study but based on the summary it looks like there was a statistically significant difference in overall fertility. It still never came close to replacement rate and tells us nothing about the sign on the correlation between a woman’s educational and career achievements and her fertility.
There’s arguments on all sides about whether sub replacement fertility among woman with successful white collar careers is or isn’t a problem. But what I haven’t seen is any country that’s managed to reverse it. So we don’t in fact know if it is possible.
How much is society making them choose versus the biology of pregnancy and delivery versus there being 24 hours in everyone’s day and anyone can only do so many different things well in those 24?
> It’s entirely possible to have a culture where women can have families and careers at the same time.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Can't be a good mother and a good worker. You can't be at home taking care of your baby and at work being productive for your company/boss/etc. Not rocket science.
> It’s entirely a cultural problem and is completely solvable if there is a collective will to solve it.
The most egalitarian societies with the most women-friendly workplaces have some of the lowest birth rates. Your assertion, which has been around for decades, has been well tested and well debunked. For decades, wealthy western societies have increased benefits for working mothers. Birth rates continued to decline.
If you want higher birth rates, you want women to spend less time in school/work and have children in their prime birthing years ( 18-29 ). That's simple biological fact. The question for society is whether we want women at home with their babies for the benefit of their families or we want women at work for the benefit of corporations/shareholders. The elites have spoken and it's the latter. It's why the elites want more immigration. We need to maintain the population somehow.
The issue isn't complex unless you want it to be complex because you don't like the simple truth.
> You can't have your cake and eat it too. Can't be a good mother and a good worker. You can't be at home taking care of your baby and at work being productive for your company/boss/etc.
Of course you can.
Wait, are you expecting the mother to be doing all the child-rearing?
It is culturally possible but given how busy (say) I am now, I can't even imagine being a woman and choosing to have a baby concurrently. Maybe if I had truly vast amounts of money to spend on "automation" (of sorts), but I think it's somewhat fantastical to think it's easily done.
I don't know why it's taken for granted that this is so easy to solve. The truth is, there's a biological inequality between the genders that results in these discrepancies. It's not so simple to eliminate the consequences of giving birth to another human-- it's a long and difficult process, and society can't change that. Capitalism destroys the ecology of poor people around the world and we just about accept it can't be stopped, so I don't really think capitalism can be stopped from trying to extract maximal resources from the workforce(and therefore have bad policies for pregnant women).
Smart women have absolutly no problem reproducing because most of them optimize not for the amount of money earned in lifetime but for the quality of life. And one of the metrics is having children.
I believe sociologists of the future will find a way to quantify the quality of life with such an ease as they do it with salaries. Let's talk about "happiness gap" then and see who is smart
From the real world, I can assure you this is entirely untrue.
It may seem like that if you’re living in a super high cost of living city and everyone in your work social bubble is in their 20s and early 30s, but step outside of those small bubbles and age groups and there are plenty of happy parents.
This whole “lol parents are dumb” meme really needs to die.
Parents are not dumb but they are paying a high price that in a totally incentive-driven world nobody would pay. We (the public) who set the incentives need to do some soul-searching about the question of why we assign such a high cost to creating our future.
Sure, but, there is plenty of evidence that educational attainment is negatively correlated with number of children. And so we have this strange phenomenon of educational success negatively correlated to evolutionary success. Here is a graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attain...
I’m always baffled when I read these comments from non-parents who describe parenting as the end of your life.
Daycare isn’t prohibitively expensive for any of us in tech careers. Anyone quitting a $150K+ job to avoid paying $20-30K for a good daycare for the few years before kids entire school isn’t doing it because it’s the optimal financial decision.
You don’t stop having a career or earning money or having career advancement when you have kids.
Yeah, at least in tech the cost angle seems essentially irrelevant. Kids aren’t cheap, but the necessary expenses (food, care, clothes) are small relative to an income of six figures.
I wonder if young adults making 120k are hearing “kids are crazy expensive” from families living on 60k, and developing a somewhat warped perception.
I live in SF and my coworkers with kids are paying roughly what I pay in rent for daycare alone. I'd guess that food, clothing, and healthcare are probably another 50% or more on top of that. Even with a FAANG salary, $30-50k per kid per year is a heck of a lot of money.
You can spend $20k on food, clothing, and healthcare for a kid, but pants for a preschooler are like $8 at Target, and they really don’t eat much at that size.
I know the daycare in SF is crazy, and I sympathize (it’s not cheap for me either) but as others noted it’s only a few years, and you only pay for full time daycare in the first place if you have dual incomes.
Yeah daycare / preschool is 20-30k in SF but as you noted it is temporary. Once the kids reach K5 SFUSD is free (well paid for by taxes).
A bigger problem is after school care. All the programs at SFUSD along with all the independent ones have long waitlists.
Those of us in tech are fortunate: work hours are flexible so it isn't as much of a problem as it would be for many others.
(For our part I aim to be ambitious at work which has paid off so far and my partner stays at home, but that is not easy or even possible for everyone in tech let alone those outside it)
I agree that for high income people ($150k+ for the sake of argument) it’s not strictly speaking a good idea financially to drop out of the workforce to avoid child care expenses.
However, given the way taxes on two earner families work it is a much cheaper decision then it looks like at first blush.
Maybe this is a good thing. But it is a bit counterintuitive if you think of salary in pretax dollars.
I am not sure what you are referring to, but the tax penalty for dual similar income earning married filing joint tax filers was removed in the 2017 tax cuts and jobs act.
Looks like $110k minus the taxes on $150k of additional income, which are probably ~40%, so $110k minus $60k = $50k more disposal income. I still do not see what taxes have to do with this, the $40k childcare cost is the only variable.
Also, that is ignoring the far higher probability of being able to earn $150k and more for the woman in the years agree her kids are out of daycare, plus the benefit of the woman maintaining financial independence.
As lotsofpulp said you'd be ahead by at least 50k with both spouses working even accounting for taxes at 40% which is almost certainly on the high side. Total tax rate for federal+state on the extra 150k is likely less but it depends on the exact situation.
In reality that's just pure cash. You'd be ahead even more in terms of saving for retirement which can also lower your tax basis. Benefits might also be better - some employers cover a greater percentage of the employee's premium so having the 150k spouse covered under a different plan could save money. There may be other benefits worth considering.
Also childcare at 40k is overpriced even for SF. All day preschool is 20-30k unless you're trying to get them into a super exclusive preschool as a status thing. Once they start real school you only need to cover after school care for 10-15k. So net take home would be more like 50-90k depending.
> I’m always baffled when I read these comments from non-parents who describe parenting as the end of your life.
Because it is?
Seriously, everything now revolves around your child--as it should.
You can't "just stay jobless" for a year anymore. You won't take that project that makes you skip your children's play, sports, etc. You probably won't move very far (or at all) if you change jobs because your children are in school somewhere. You will stay in a job that may be suboptimal because uprooting your family is lots of effort. etc.
And, this is doubly so for women. Women, in spite of everything, are still expected to be the primary child caretaker.
How is this not the "end of your life"--especially if you are female?
Daycare still requires you to pick up the kid and drive it there. And with culture of mandatory long hours, you can't really do it on time. Plus they get sick, they need to be driven to extracurriculars etc.
Same with school later. You can't have kids 12 hours a day there.
Yeah, I am not a native speaker. It felt "natural" to say it. It was not meant as some kind of statement on the nature of children. It does not force me to pick gender, but even that was not conscious decision.
“It”, being neuter, is usually reserved for inanimate objects and sometimes wild animals. Calling a living human, dog, or cat “it” is basically a slur.
Extremely unlikely there will ever be a will to do this considering the long term value to be compensated (hundreds of thousands of dollars per child, if not $1MM). Society is too short sighted and short term financially focused.
The world already has almost 8 billion people though (with population momentum landing is at 10B-11B by the end of the century), so I’m hard pressed to argue for more children (and the necessary policy and financial support) when we, in aggregate, already don’t take care of the ones here (no subsidized child care, limited parental leave, half a million kids in foster care at any one time [US], ~120 million unintended pregnancies globally annually, etc). Also consider that in parts of Europe where pro natalist policies are very robust (subsidized childcare, very generous leave policies, and “baby bonuses”), the fertility rate continues to decline regardless. Kids might be valuable to society, but the data supports the idea they are not as important to individuals (opportunity costs, life choices, etc).
> The world already has almost 8 billion people though
The grocery stores are already full of food, why do we still need farms? If you ever plan to stop working you need young people to buy your 401k stocks from you and pay for your Social Security.
The problem with low fertility rates is not (primarily) population decline, it's demographic collapse. As long as fertility is below replacement the proportion of elderly increases _forever_.
What about immigration?
The US is in a much better position wrt to this than many other nations because of our high rates of immigration but low fertility is a global phenomenon outside of a handful of places like Nigeria and Afghanistan.
> the fertility rate continues to decline regardless.
You're right. Nobody has figured out how to raise fertility rates once they start dropping.
> Extremely unlikely there will ever be a will to do this considering the long term value to be compensated (hundreds of thousands of dollars per child, if not $1MM).
Parent here. You don’t need $1mm to raise a kid. You don’t need anywhere close to that, actually.
Kids aren’t free, obviously, but this internet meme that they’ll bankrupt you is getting out of control.
Honestly, how do you think people making the median US household income are affording kids? Multiple kids, even? I hope it’s obvious that households with two kids earning <$100K per year (a common situation) aren’t spending $1mm on each of them.
What people prefer is what matters, now that people can enjoy sex without worrying about having kids. I would not have had kids with a household income less than $100k (or even $200k), but that is just my preference for the type of life I would have wanted for the kids. I grew up poor as the child of struggling immigrants, and I want my kids to be very far from that quality of life for the portion of their life I am responsible for.
I’m not sure how you can spend a 200k income on a kid and avoid them becoming spoiled rotten.
Having been poor, you should have a good sense of just how little money it actually takes to leave the insecurity & want far behind (in my own experience & opinion)
I think a lot of people on this site are from Silicon Valley, and what they actually mean is "I wouldn't start a family until I could afford a 3-bedroom house in a reasonable school district, and you can't afford such a house in Silicon Valley without a 6-figure income"
I did not say their cost ($270k in 2022 inflation adjusted dollars per child in the US). I said their long term value (over their lifetime to society).
If you’re at a median income, you’re barely getting by with kids.
Life is one big selection criteria bias. You don’t need all societies to work, just one. Unfortunately for us it may not be our society that makes it so there may be temporary setbacks. So long as designer baby technology is developed practically any amount of dysgenics can be reversed.
This is because childbirth is an externality that we expect women to bear.
Isn't it strange how there are only three factors of production? Land, capital and labor? Ultimately everything is being derived from the land but surely it doesn't take much imagination that humans are also derived from female humans. Reproductive work is not part of any economic model. It's just lumped in with labor even though it is not compensated and the very thing it produces is labor.
I predict that we will see the development of artificial wombs in the next 10-15 years and combined with rudimentary genetic modification this will result in a baby boom from the middle and upper class.
"Artificial wombs" for the rich exist today, and are called surrogates. Ultimately the bigger problem isn't the birth itself but the time, money and space required to raise a child after it is born. For more and more young professionals in urban areas the numbers simply don't work out.
Cancer progress in the last 40 years hasn’t been that great (I’m not discounting the hard work and incredible breakthroughs there have been, etc). I’d predict we’re closer to a cancer cure and other not so soon medical advances than a fully functional artificial womb. (10-15 years would be F-ing amazing but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 100-150 years and aging was cured first).
Edit: bc I forgot, we can't even replicate human breast milk fully well!
Perhaps the level of love and care for a baby/child are positively correlated to the severity of challenges parents face during pregnancy and eventual pain a mother endures in the natural childbirth. Hazing rituals exist for a reason. Will the nature of parental bonds change when Amazon delivers your baby via an electric stork/drone ? Will abuse and neglect increase the way it does with step-children, for example. It's admittedly a dark thought but worth contemplating since that technology seems inevitable and is already possible through surrogates as noted by another comment.
I was thinking similarly. From neurological, psychological and human perspectives-- women spend their pregnancy bonding with their child before they're even born. They give their child names, learn their mood, play music or sing for them. They feel their babies kick and plan all the things they're gonna do together when the baby is born. Large amounts of oxytocin, the bonding hormone, are released to strengthen the emotional bond between mother and child. Not just oxytocin is released, but a variety of hormones prepare mother and child together.
I think the fact that we so naively try to paper over all of this with "it's cool we will just invent metal birthing pods to replace this" is part of why we have this problem in the first place. People didn't intentionally have children throughout history because it's logical, they did it because of emotions(99% of the time). We don't really emotionally appreciate the fact that women can CREATE LIFE. Like it's actually an amazing unbelievable thing. But it's rarely viewed as that
Sexless, genderless, genetically modified people grown in vats operated by the state and implanted with cybernetic backpacks that short-circuit decades of education before they're sent off to subvert alien civilizations and expand the empire is obviously the way to go; this demented legacy biology game we're trapped in is played out af.
Seems unlikely for a few reasons. But let's say that the technology gets there - what's the value of outsourcing gestation? Pregnancy is no doubt uncomfortable though some women also say they enjoy it, but on a practical level all it takes is a few hundred extra calories a day to incubate a baby. And women in less physical professions seem to be able to work for basically the entire period. The thing is that once the child is born it will take much more effort to raise and that cannot be outsourced to cheap technology at this point, and that work has always fallen more on women.
I don’t think genetic modification is a necessary pre-requisite. Having a market for sperm and eggs where the genetic value is known could be sufficient and this can be done with existing data science. Creating and testing a panel of IVF babies and selecting for certain genes and away from others would be a powerful evolutionary force.
Even if this tech was invented I don't think it would move the needle that much. A pregnancy will keep you away from work for a few months. Taking care of the baby is when the shit hits the fan.
It's interesting how the world of dysgenics ignores the idea of mass class-correlated die-offs, despite them featuring prominently in both the historical and genealogical record.
COVID was a dress rehearsal. Deaths were heavily skewed toward poorer people, who had to go to work as essential workers despite the danger, or dumber people, who refused to get vaxxed. We'll likely have a famine later this year and into next - rich people will wince at the hit to their pocketbook from higher food prices, poor people will starve and die. If we get nuked, it's going to hit the inner cities, where relatively poorer people concentrate in dense housing, rather than the country estates and vacation homes of the rich. Poor people join the armed forces because it's their best option, rich people go to college and get a draft deferment. If a hostile totalitarian government takes over, the "brightest and most diligent" will bribe the right people to be left alone, the hoi polloi will get shot in the streets if they look at an armed soldier the wrong way.
Genealogical studies have indicated that most Europeans living today are descended from the nobility of the High Middle Ages. What happened to all the peasants? Well, between Black Death, the Hundred Years War, Wars of the Roses, Wars of Religion, and other mass-casualty events, most of them caught fatal diseases from living in crowded and unsanitary city conditions, or they got sent to die in some nobleman's war.
